A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Micro Stream
Some other stuff ...
On This Day
Webring
What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Finally, I have embarked on the Augean task of dealing with my bookmarks and tags, a reminder that link rot is all pervasive and also that rot is evitable if you make the effort.
The worst is when entities that clearly could afford to fix their links simply don't bother. I'm thinking of one in particular that migrated away from TypePad.
The original link was to:
http://example.typepad.com/hand_picked/2009/10/url.html
The new link, which I eventually found because I really wanted a record, was to
https://example.org/2009/10/21/url/
Even my limited skills could have written a redirect to send visitors to the correct page. In fact, they have.
I haven't checked that every page I link to exists, nor will I. I also have not checked whether the links in that page are broken, although I have tried to do so on this site. In case you're thinking of doing the right thing too, let me recommend Fixing 404 errors and link rot, while maintaining authenticity on James Cridland's blog.
Cridland is keeping the links in his newsletter operational, although it is kind of funny that his very first example is not actually a good Wayback Machine capture. I too have a newsletter with lots of links, many of which are probably rotten. Maybe I'll tackle that when I've finished cleaning up my bookmarks.
And in case you're wondering, in two days I have done tags starting with A, B, and C. I forgot to record the numbers at the start, but I am now down to 10809 bookmarks and 595 tags, from about 12,000 and almost 700.
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